5 Low-Hanging Fruits for Increasing Your Ecommerce Store Revenue
As a wise philosopher once said, “If you run an online store, you need to market it more and more to get majority of your customers entering your virtual door.”
Based on this profound (and entirely fabricated) quote, what we can consider as its take-away lesson is this: marketing is the life and blood of every business, including your brand in the ecommerce industry.
If you’re not doing it effectively, then you’re leaving money on the table.
Sure, as an ecommerce owner, you’ve already heard of countless online marketing strategies designed to help you promote your online store and hopefully reap in your rewards in the form of significant boosts in your profit.
You already have a decade’s worth of knowledge stored in your timeline. You want to start retargeting your ads, following up on your abandoned carts and starting a loyalty program for your customers – but you have so much to do and so little time to do them all!
In this blog post, we’ll let you discover the five truly effective ecommerce marketing tips that you can do today. What’s the best part about them? You can start doing them all right away.
1. SEO Title Optimization
What it is: Title tags are used on search engine results pages to show previews for a given page.
If your customer is looking for a specific product via a search engine, the probability of your target customer clicking on your website can be higher if your page is included among the top rankings.
35 out of 37 influential thought leaders in the SEO industry believe that keyword placement in the title tag was the most important place to use keywords to achieve high rankings.
What does this mean for you, then?
If you want your target customers to easily identify your brand’s value proposition and discover what your products can offer to them differently, you need to optimize your SEO title.
How you can start today: The most important thing to do to optimize your site’s title tag is to insert the keyword you want to position.
If you want to position for the keyword “women handbags”, then putting that keyword in the title tag is the one of the best way to increase your site’s postion for that term.
In the image above, you’ll see the first four results for that keyword. Although three of those 4 results don’t have the keyword “women handbags” in it, title tags are still one of the most important SEO factors.
Also, if you want to stand out from your competition, include a value proposition such as “free shipping” in your title tag. Be careful of keyword stuffing, though. Make sure that your title’s readability is still observed.
If you’re selling tote bags, and your customer typed “tote bags free shipping” on Google, here’s what will come up in the results.
Most customers would click on the first two results because they contain the phrase “free shipping”. On the other hand, the phrase “shipped free” is unusual so it may not get as much clicks as the first two.
For detailed information about optimizing your SEO title, why don’t you get it straight from the horse’s mouth instead? Here’s what Google has to say about it.
2. Email List-Building
What it is: An email list is a collection of active email subscribers who you can send your email marketing newsletters to regularly.
If you’re wondering whether building an email list is for you or not, keep this in mind: 44% of email recipients purchased at least once in 2012 based on a promotional email.
Not yet enough to convince you? 77% of consumers prefer to receive permission-based marketing communications through email.
If you’re looking for other marketing channels that you can take advantage of – don’t.
Your customers already told you they want to be emailed. Your only job right now is to do exactly that.
How you can start today: If you think you can skip this section because you already have an email marketing database, I have shocking news for you, buddy: your database degrades by about 22.5% every year.
To ensure that you’re consistently adding on fresh contacts to your list, here’s a simple tip you can do today: add a call-to-action button to sign up for your email newsletters. Put this at the top of your online store’s official Facebook page.
Want to get started? Here’s Facebook’s take on the matter.
3. Setting Up Autoresponders
What it is: An autoresponder is a utility which enables you to send automatic emails based on specific triggers that you set up.
You can use autoresponders to send emails to your customers based on instructions that you provide.
For example, you can send automatic emails when someone joins your email list, when someone has been in your email list for 3 months or when someone hasn’t logged into their accounts for 30 days.
The best thing about this is you don’t need to email them manually. You can automate the whole process.
How you can start today: If you’re a growing business with less than 2.000 email subscribers, you can use MailChimp for free. It’s a “free-forever” service that helps you send automated emails to your target customers.
For example, why don’t you send an email offer to your subscribers who haven’t been active in the last 3 months?
If you want to learn more about building and enhancing your email list, take a look at this amazing guide.
4. Add Pricing in Ads
What it is: Whenever you’re promoting a new ad for your product, make sure to include prices. Sounds insanely simple, doesn’t it? This is why we’re talking about low-hanging fruits.
With the increasing costs per click, the confusing amount of service providers and the limited text characters that you can include in your ad, you need to screen your traffic even before they can click on your ad and come to your website.
How do you do this, though? You can’t ask everyone about their probability of purchasing from you. You can’t know a person’s stage in the buying process right away!
You do this by including prices in your ads.
How you can start today: For example, if your target market is willing to spend $50 on your product, you now have the idea that the only people who will click on your ad are those who can only spend your expected amount.
This way, you can save your advertising budget for qualified buyers instead of leaking your advertising money by showing your ad to someone who expected to spend less.
Before creating an ad, though, you need to spend a few hours of your time today to research on your competition’s price range. You want to find the sweet spot in your pricing by offering more value with the same price, or by offering free shipping in your advertisement.
5. Upselling
What it is: In upselling, you “up” your “selling” game and hopefully increase your revenue by offering upgrades (better specifications or more quantity) to your customers.
This way, you improve your customer’s shopping experience by giving them access to products that will be complementary to their main purchase. And at the same time, you add more money to their order value.
It is 6 to 7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep a current one.
The good thing about upselling is that your customers are already buying from you – there’s less sales friction and less effort on your part. They’re already willing to do business with you: you only need to gently coax them into spending more.
How you can start today: You can upsell to your customers while they’re browsing through your online store – but why settle with this age-old cliche when you can actually start upselling via emails?
Also, if you can’t upsell today because you’re still testing the waters, why not upsell for tomorrow by incentivizing future purchases with you?
For a free solution to enable you to upsell to your customers via transaction emails, you can start using CM Commerce – absolutely for free. What you’ll like about this is that the software is free – forever!
Conclusion
In boosting your profits, knowing about the effective ecommerce marketing techniques is good.
But when the time comes that you experience information overload and you’re into analysis paralysis mode, knowing is useless in increasing your online store’s revenue.
More importantly, you need to start with doing.
And with these five low-hanging fruits for increasing ecommerce ideas, you can be sure that you’ll be able to successfully do at least one tip today.
Stop bookmarking and storing information, and start putting what you know into application instead.
Vague ideas don’t pay the bills. Effective actions do.
Which of these five marketing ideas are you most likely to start with today? Let us know in the comments so we can help you get started! And don’t forget to download our eBook for even more tips on how to grow your store.